This blog describes Metatime in the Posthuman experience, drawn from Sir Isaac Newton's secret work on the future end of times, a tract in which he described Histories of Things to Come. His hidden papers on the occult were auctioned to two private buyers in 1936 at Sotheby's, but were not available for public research until the 1990s.

Also, a Saudi Arabian blogger was flogged with fifty lashes for criticizing Islam on his liberal blog. He will receive 20 weekly whipping sessions until his sentence of one thousand lashes is carried out. The Canadian Press via Yahoo:

DUBAI,
United Arab Emirates - A Saudi blogger convicted of insulting Islam was
brought after Friday prayers to a public square in the port city of Jiddah and flogged 50 times before hundreds of spectators, a witness to
the lashing said. The witness said Raif Badawi's feet and hands were shackled during
the flogging but his face was visible. He remained silent and did not
cry out, said the witness, who spoke to The Associated Press on
condition of anonymity fearing government reprisal.

Badawi was sentenced last May to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes.
He had criticized Saudi Arabia's powerful clerics on a liberal blog he
founded. The blog has since been shut down. He was also ordered to pay a
fine of 1 million riyals or about $266,600.

Rights activists say Saudi
authorities are using Badawi's case as a warning to others who think to
criticize the kingdom's powerful religious establishment from which the
ruling family partly derives its authority.
London-based Amnesty International said he would receive 50 lashes
once a week for 20 weeks. Saudi Arabia's close ally, the United States,
had called on authorities to cancel the punishment.

Despite international pleas for
his release, Badawi, a father of three, was brought from prison by bus
to the public square on Friday and flogged on the back in front of a
crowd that had just finished midday prayers at a nearby mosque. His face
was visible and, throughout the flogging, he clenched his eyes and
remained silent, said the witness.
The witness, who also has close knowledge of the case, said the lashing lasted about 15 minutes.

Badawi has been held since
mid-2012 after he founded the Free Saudi Liberals blog. He used the blog
to criticize the kingdom's influential clerics who follow a strict and
ultraconservative interpretation of Islam known as Wahhabism, which
originated in Saudi Arabia.
He was originally sentenced in 2013 to seven years in prison and 600
lashes in relation to the charges, but after an appeal, the judge
stiffened the punishment. Following his arrest, his wife and children
left the kingdom for Canada.

Ensaf Haidar, Badawi's spouse, was devastated after learning the
flogging had gone ahead, a person close to the family told The Canadian
Press.

Haidar was so distraught she couldn't send her kids to school in
Quebec, where she is currently living with them, the person said in an
email exchange.

She fled to Egypt in April 2012 with their two daughters, Najwa and
Miryam, and son, Tirad, according to Amnesty International Canada
spokeswoman Anne Sainte-Marie.
The family moved to Quebec in November 2013.

Rights groups argue that the case against Badawi is part of a wider
crackdown on freedom of speech and dissent in Saudi Arabia since the
2011 Arab Spring uprisings. Criticism of clerics is seen as a red line
because of their prestige in the kingdom, as well as their influential
role in supporting government policies.

According to Amnesty, the charges against Badawi mention his failure
to remove articles by other people on his website. He was also accused
in court of ridiculing Saudi Arabia's morality police.

In a statement after the flogging, Amnesty called the flogging a
"vicious act of cruelty" and said Badawi's "only 'crime' was to exercise
his right to freedom of expression by setting up a website for public
discussion."

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki has called the punishment an
"inhumane" response to someone exercising his right to freedom of
expression and religion.

The Charlie Hebdo murders and Badawi flogging reconfirmed a radical Islamic mandate to kill or destroy blasphemers. These are not just attacks on freedom of speech. This censorship is different from violent censorship in oppressive régimes, where state critics might disappear, be tortured, and be silenced in a prison work camp or mass grave.

These acts of censorship are broadly theatrical (as are others). They seek to enforce surreal new boundaries of a community using brute force and fear. These were town-style enforcement performances, projected on a global scale. Like the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the murder of Theo van Gogh, and the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack particularly presented the world with a grim future plan for society. And, MI5 states, more attacks are to follow.

Before the murders, the last Charlie Hebdo cover featured French novelist Michel
Houellebecq. Houellebecq's latest book predicts a future arch-Islamic France and was released on 7 January 2015.

The most recent Charlie Hebdo cartoon before terrorists murdered the newspaper's main staff - poked fun at a novel about a future radically Islamic France, written by novelist Michel Houellebecq: In 2015 I lose my teeth. In 2022, I celebrate Ramadan. Image Source: Gulf News.

Caption for the above image from Reason.com: "On the day of
the Charlie Hebdo massacre,
the magazine's cover featured a
caricature of controversial French author and provocateur Michel
Houellebecq sporting a wizard's hat. 'Predictions of the seer
Houellebecq,' reads the cover copy. The Houellebecq cartoon
offers a pair of predictions: 'In 2015, I'll lose my
teeth,' and, 'In 2022, I'll observe Ramadan.'What's going on? Houellebecq's new
novel, Soumission (Submission) is set
in a near-future France ruled by a Muslim political party.
Scheduled to be published in France on Wednesday [7 January 2015], it had already
inspired some highly charged controversy over whether
its message—and its author—was Islamophobic. According to Laurent
Joffrin, the editor in chief of the leftist
paper Liberation, the book's publication 'will mark
the date in history when the ideas of the far-right made a grand
return to serious French literature.' (Joffrin refers to
Houellebecq as 'serious' because he is the winner of several French
literary awards.)" [See the Guardian's review of Soumission here. It is available on Amazon here.]

When it comes to tyranny, you don't need to fear jihadists to fear the future. Globalization, combined with communications innovations, created vast new potentials for authoritarian power and profit. The Internet could become the skeleton of a totalitarian superstate or superstates. It is not a question of fearing only jihadists. It is a question of fearing the potential for tyranny everywhere, whether it comes from extreme traditionalists, from radical progressives, or from the middle of the road.

The Web could still remain a seat of freedom. But from the point of view of future authoritarians, initial freedoms on the Internet gave anyone online enough rope with which to hang themselves. Everything you write on the Internet, reacting in the now, can be dredged up and used to judge you later.

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

"A Japanese student was allegedly kidnapped and gang raped by five Indian men near the Buddhist shrine Bodh Gaya for a month." Image Source: Daily Mail.

If you want a cataclysmic, in-a-nutshell example of what is wrong with the world today, read the news item from a few days ago about the Japanese student who was kidnapped and gang raped for a month near the site where Buddha attained enlightenment in India. Or: follow today's coverage of the Charlie Hebdoal Qaeda terrorist murders in Paris, in which twelve people died, including a policeman who was shot in the head at point blank range. The summary of those events is here. The two outrages bookended Christmas in December and Orthodox Christmas, which is celebrated on 7 January in the Julian calendar.

About Me

Welcome to my blog, dedicated to the aporia, anomie, mysteries, and nervous tensions of the turn of the Millennium. I'm a writer and academic, trained in the field of history. These are my histories of things that define the spirit of our times. This blog also goes beyond historians' visions of the past, and examines how metatime and time are perceived in other media and disciplines, between generations, and in high and pop culture.